Unfortunately, its video display occasionally goes black and then recovers.Windows generates a popup saying that it had to restart the display driver. This usually happens once every few days, but happened twice this morning.

The system event log reports that nvlddmkm stopped, with an event id of 4101.

A series of web searches finally let me to a thread on notebookreview.com which seemed to indicate the problem might be related to the graphics chipset going into "powermizer" mode (although I see the problem when the system is using AC power -- powermizer supposedly is disabled then). At any rate, I've entered the registry settings which supposedly disable powermizer mode entirely. Now to see if that actually helps....

I've updated the driver to the most recent version from Nvidia (including cleaning the registry after deinstalling the previous copy), disabled the powermizer, and set IRQ8 (cmos/clock) to priority 1 and IRQ16 (nvidia graphics & audio, and some other stuff) to priority 2 -- none of these made any difference.

I am having the exact same issue with my E6510. I have updated the BIOS and the Video Card driver to the latest available. Still have the problem. Works perfectly and then a few times a day it will freeze everything, including sound, and after what seems like a minute it will flicker and recover the screen and post a 4101 to the System Event Log. It passed the System Diagnostics tests on the System Board, BIOS, Video, and Audio.

I have just sent an email to support. Not sure what to do. Please update this post if there is any progress.

I've done all the "easy" software and firmware updates with no changes in the symptom, so the Unisys (Dell) field service engineer is replacing the motherboard even as I type (using my desktop computer 😉 ). I didn't realize what a big deal it is -- dozens of tiny screws and many small subassemblies have to be carefully removed and reinstalled.

If this doesn't fix it, the next step will be a full reinstall of Win7 from scratch, but leaving out as many of Dell's add-on features as possible. 😞

A rather detailed description of the issue (video driver hanging and having to be restarted) and the many possible things that can cause it, along with some possible remedies, is on the Nvidia forum. See

Thanks for the info. I got off of the phone with Dell tech support and since I told them the System diag checked out, they are saying it is software. Did your system fail any diag tests? Thanks for your time.

Except for my interactions with the Unisys tech, all of my contacts with Dell have been by email. primarily so that there would be no misunderstandings, but also because it's an annoying but not catastrophic problem, and I didn't think it warranted any urgency.

I saw no diagnostic failures, either, I then did all of the firmware and driver updates that they told me to do, but the problem persisted. The person at Dell then said to have the motherboard replaced. I subsequently tried a few other "obvious" software changes before actually having the board replaced, but none of them helped, either. Most recently, a couple of glitches happened at night when I left the system powered on but "idle". (I put idle in quotes because there are a surprising number of system services running, although they don't do much most of the time.)

There haven't been any glitches since the motherboard was replaced this morning, but it often has run several days without glitching, so that doesn't mean anything.

I definitely think this is a hardware issue, and I am trying to push for a hardware replacement. Getting them to acknowledge that it could still be hardware even after it passes the diagnostics test is a little difficult, but hopefully they will swap my computer or the motherboard soon. Please let me know if it glitches on you again with the new board installed. Much appreciated!

In my case, at least, it seems that replacing the motherboard did NOT help. Although it has not yet gone so far as the black-screen-video-driver restart, I am still seeing several-second-long pauses in screen updates when the cursor doesn't move and the clock's display freezes. I suspect it's only a matter of time before one of them is long enough to trigger an automatic video restart.

My next step will be a full reinstall of Win7 from scratch, omitting drivers and software for the features that I don't have or don't plan to ever use. I'm hoping to do that this afternoon.